To a fly, a fly swatter is the size of tennis court and to avoid getting killed it must react, and fly 6 to 10 times it’s body length all in a fraction of a second. Yet a fly’s brain is smaller then the head of a pin and even with our superior brain, strength, size, and armed with a fly swatter we sometimes miss. How is this possible?
Could time pass at different speeds for different animals?
What if 1 second of our time passed like a minute for a fly? If so, the fly would see us as moving in very slow motion and could easily get out of the way of the fly swatter in time. The fly’s seeming short life span of 5 weeks for us, could seem like many years to a fly.
Most of us have herd the term “Dog Years”, meaning that dogs compared to us seem to age 7 years for every 1 of ours, or 7 times faster then us. What if time for dogs passes 7 times faster then us? Although not nearly as slowly, dogs, like flies would see us moving in slow motion. Dogs may also feel as though they lived as long as us. It could also explain how fast and quick dogs can be compared to us. It’s always amazed me how with a dog by your side, you can throw a frisbee and in the 4 seconds it takes to travel 50 meters, the dog can run that distance and catch it before it hits the ground. If time for the dog is 7 times faster then us and was adjusted to our time, it would be the same for us to run 50 meters in 28 seconds (7 x 4=28), that’s easy to do for most people.
On the other hand most animals that are larger then us, like elephants, seem to move slowly compared to us. In the wild elephants can live up to 70 of our years. Could time for elephants pass slightly slower then it does for us? Does time pass faster the smaller the animal is and slower the larger it is.
Does the size or mass of an animal effect how fast time passes?
The idea of time passing at different rates is not new. In the 1800’s, Albert Einstein came up with the ”The Special Theory of Relativity” meaning the faster you travel the more time slows down. His scale being the speed of light that travels at 186,000 miles per second made it difficult to test back in his day. If you could travel at the speed of light you would be able to circle the Earth 7 times in one second. Now with rockets that reach speeds that barely register on this scale there is strong evidence he was right. Time sensitive satellites in Earth orbit must continuously have their clocks adjusted. Even though the adjustment is small, so is the velocity of the satellite compared to the speed of light. If this theory holds true on a larger scale and if a person on earth could observe someone by video, in a rocket traveling close to the speed of light, they would seem to move in slow motion and have a much longer life span. The opposite would be true if the person in the rocket could observe someone on earth by video, they would be moving very fast and age quicker.
Obviously different animals on Earth are not flying around at the speed of light but what about their brains? Like light, the electromagnetic wave from electricity also travels at 186,000 miles per second. Our brains are electrical and work by transmission of small electrochemical transmissions between neurons. Smaller animals generally have smaller brains so the electrical transmissions would not take as long to get from one side of the brain to the other or from one part of their body to the other. The human brain being thousands of times larger than a fly’s would take thousands of times longer for a signal to get from one side to the other. Could this cause us to think slower, react slower, move slower. Could this have a time altering effect?
Einstein did not stop with ” The Special Theory of Relativity” as being the only thing that effects how fast time exists, he also came up with the theory of “Gravitational Time Dilation”. With this theory the closer someone is to a large mass the more time would slow down for them. His scale for this is also big as he compared a large mass to be that of a black hole. A black hole is formed from a massive star in space that has run out of fuel and collapsed to a small point, imagine a million of our suns crushed down so small they would fit in a small house. The gravity from a black hole is almost unimaginable. On earth we weigh more then we would on the moon because gravity becomes stronger the bigger the mass. On a black hole the gravity is so strong that it can bend even light towards it. This theory of Einstein’s was also difficult to prove years ago but through experiments now using the Earth’s mass and extremely accurate clocks on spacecraft, they do in fact start to run faster the further they get away from the mass of the Earth. If this theory holds true on a larger scale and a person on Earth could view someone by video near a black hole, they would move in slow motion and live much longer then the person on Earth. The opposite is true for the person by the black hole watching a person back on earth by video, they would be moving very fast and age much quicker.
Still there are no black holes on earth that could explain how time seems to pass at different speeds for animals of different masses but what if you imagine a person having the mass of a black hole and a fly having a mass of the Earth. If this was possible and Einstein’s theory is right then the person and the fly would experience time at different rates like the example above. Would the same time difference continue to hold true as the scale was reduced to our current sizes? If not at what point would it stop?
For years scientists have been baffled to explain exactly how birds are able to flap their wings fast enough to fly but what if birds also experience time faster then us but the laws of physics remain constant. If a bird has to flap his wings 8 times in a second our time to fly but experiences time 16 times faster then us, it would only have to flap its wings once every 2 seconds of its time to fly.
Einstein discovered 2 things that can alter time: mass, and speed. Could one of these things explain why different animals seem to live at different speeds? Could there be other unknown influences, maybe a “Biological Time Dilation” with yet to be discovered parameters? The next time you observe a small animal imagine them in a time altered state? Would they appear to move and react more like us if you could slow down there movements?
Dave Lister
listerlogic.com